AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT RDNA 3 Rumors Allege Up To 15,360-Core Navi 31 GPU
We know AMD will soon be fleshing out its Radeon RX 6000 series with the Radeon RX 6600 XT and Radeon RX 6600 (add-in board partner PowerColor can hardly contain its excitement), but rumors are starting to surface about next-generation products, too. More specifically, the latest chatter suggests Navi 31 will burst onto the scene like the Kool-Aid man going through a brick wall, with a whopping 15,360 cores in tow.
Before we get into the meat of the rumor, let's offer up a reference point, that being the Radeon RX 6900 XT. That is AMD's current generation flagship graphics card for gamers. It's powered by a Navi 21 XTX graphic chip with 80 compute units, 5,120 stream processors (or cores), and 16GB of GDDR6 memory tied to a 256-bit bus, for 512GB of memory bandwidth.
Other specs include 320 TMUs, 128 ROPs, 80 RT cores, and 128MB of Infinity Cache. At stock settings, the card has a 1,825MHz base clock, 2,015MHz game clock, and 2,250MHz boost clock.
Looking ahead, multiple leakers (including @kopite7kimi) claim AMD's eventual Navi 31 GPU will feature up to 15,360 stream processors. Assuming all those cores find their way to AMD's gaming lineup, we could be looking at a Radeon RX 7900 XT with triple the number of cores as the current generation flagship.
Combined with whatever improvements RDNA 3 bring to the table, AMD's top card could be a massively faster part than anything AMD has to offer today. That would set the stage for an interesting showdown between the Radeon RX 7000 series and NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 40 series, the latter of which is rumored to be based on a 5nm Ada Lovelace GPU architecture.
Here's another interesting wrinkle. A rumor is floating around that AMD will is moving away from its current compute unit (CU) arrangement for Work Group Processors (WGPs) with RDNA 3.
It is claimed Navi 31 will be configured in a dual-die (MCM) design, with each GPU die sporting 30 RDNA 3 WGPs, and 256 stream processors per WGP. These work groups would contain the CUs. Other rumored features include a 256-bit memory bus, and an expansion of the Infinity Cache allotment to 256MB or possible 512MB.
None of this should be considered as chiseled in stone, because of the rumor status and how early this information is appearing. Still, it is interesting. Whether it all pans out or not, we have some time to ponder—it's said RDNA 3 will be out in the third of fourth quarter of next year.
